Tag Archives: Food Security

As you may know, GE Foods and Human Health: A Cross-Canada Speaker’s Tour has just begun and the events have been very well attended and have resulted in excellent discussions on GE/GMO foods & human health. We look forward to the rest of this tour with Dr. Thierry Vrain and Dr. Shiv Chopra as they continue to educate the public across Canada.

Nature’s Path is generously hosting a fundraising dinner in support of the tour this Saturday, November 23rd. If you’d like to attend, tickets may still be available. Continue reading →

Genetically Engineered (GE) Foods and Human Health: A Cross-Canada Speaker’s Tour begins tomorrow, with over 30 events to follow. Please help promote the tour by sharing this info graphic on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks.

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Much of the hype around new technology centres around solving problems such as hunger or disease. But anyone who knows anything about hunger also knows that distribution is as much a problem as production. We now have 1 billion people who are obese, and 1 billion people undernourished – in other words a totally dysfunctional global food system based on profit rather than social equity and environmental sustainability. GE crops are central to this dysfunctionality.

If GE crops were about feeding hungry people, why do a majority of them (maybe 60%) go to cattle feed, which is an enormously wasteful way to use land and water – read Eleanor Boyle’s excellent book on this and why we need to eat less meat: http://www.newsociety.com/Contributors/B/Boyle-Eleanor

If our food was distributed equally there would be more than enough to feed us all. The proof – in Europe and North America we throw away 30-50% of the food we produce.

A new 30-page report that documents the growing influence of agribusiness on the multilateral food system and the lack of transparency in research funding has been released today by the international civil society organization ETC Group. The Greed Revolution: Mega Foundations, Agribusiness Muscle In On Public Goods presents three case studies – one involving the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and two involving CGIAR Centers (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research) – which point to a dangerous trend that will worsen rather than solve the problem of global hunger. The report details the involvement of, among others, Nestlé, Heineken, Monsanto, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Syngenta Foundation. Continue reading →

As I’ve travelled the Province this year, from Bella Coola (where I had coffee with a bunch of farmers including one who has just started farming pigs profitably) to Campbell River (where I met two young women farmers who are in the their second year of sharecropping from a local farmer to grow organically) to Kaslo (where I bumped into an old friend at the local coffee shop who helped turn Kaslo into a GE free zone), I’ve noticed that there are more young people wanting to get into farming- especially is we stretch young to under 40. Given the demographics with many Canadian farmers due to retire in the next 10 years, this is a positive sign. And the young farmers I have spoken to are into local and organic. I heard the same from friends outside York in Ontario recently. Who knows if this is a trend or just the places I’ve been going to, but there’s a magazine article to support this hypothesis: